Still in the race

IT’S A BREEZE Santiago-Hudson, Yaya Dacosta, Houghton, Uggams and Lee, from left, kick off the NEC season.

Photograph: Gregory Costanzo

Denzel Washington, Phylicia Rashad, Samuel L. Jackson: In the ’70s and ’80s, the troupe-cum-training-program Negro Ensemble Company turned out the finest black actors in the country. It also mounted a succession of critically hailed productions, including Joseph A. Walker’s Tony winner, The River Niger (1973), and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Soldier’s Play (1981). But by 1992, a quarter century after its founding, the organization was in debt and out of fashion. And while its curtain has never fully come down, today’s NEC—under alum Charles Weldon and currently in residence at the Harlem School of the Arts—isn’t the powerhouse it used to be.

Actor-writer-director Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who appeared in the national tour of A Soldier’s Play, believes that no matter what the NEC’s problems, its history must be respected and, more importantly, revived. “Black theater has been neglected and brushed under the rug like it never happened,” he says. “If we don’t protect its legacy and its imagery, who will?” So while helming Seven Guitars for Signature Theatre Company’s August Wilson program two years ago, he suggested that the Off Broadway house dedicate a season to the NEC’s classic plays. That retrospective is now under way with a revival of Leslie Lee’s 1975 intergenerational drama, The First Breeze of Summer. The production, helmed by Santiago-Hudson, features Leslie Uggams.

Usually the Signature focuses on a single playwright, but artistic director James Houghton sees this project as “a deepening” of the mission. “It’s totally in line with what we do,” he says. “We want to shed light on this company and its importance in the development of American theater.”

The seeds for the NEC were planted in the early ’60s, when actors Robert Hooks and Douglas Turner Ward met in the road company of A Raisin in the Sun. Together with manager Gerald S. Krone, they mounted an evening of one-acts downtown, including Ward’s Day of Absence, which earned him an Obie and an invitation to write a piece about the state of black theater artists for The New York Times. Titled “American Theatre: For Whites Only?,” the article piqued the interest of the Ford Foundation, which wanted to fund a black-theater venture. One year later, in 1967, the NEC was born, with Ward as artistic director.

Although he relinquished that position in the mid-’90s, Ward’s name and career are inextricably linked to the NEC, so Santiago-Hudson, who is serving as associate artist for the Signature season, insisted on getting his approval before starting. “I told Jim I can’t do it without Doug’s blessing,” Santiago-Hudson recalls. “He’s the one man who, on his tombstone, it’s going to say NEC—whether he wants it to or not.”

To hear him tell it, there are moments when Ward wishes he hadn’t been saddled with the headache and the heartache of the company. And while there’s definitely disappointment in his voice when he talks about its decline, the commanding 78-year-old sounds like a hungry, radical youth when discussing the Signature’s revivals of the Tony-nominated The First Breeze of Summer and Home, as well as Zooman and the Sign and a staged reading series that includes his own Day of Absence, which started it all.

“What Signature’s doing is reflecting the fact that our body of work should be done on a regular basis,” Ward says. “Once we established these plays, they didn’t get reproduced; consequently, they didn’t go into the American canon. It’s a product of unconscious racism. Most white writers who produced great works get revived. I’m sure Beth Henley’s plays are always being done somewhere.”

Ward attributes the lack of interest in NEC’s work—and the crippling decrease in funding—to a shift in the political and social climate. “When we started in 1967, it was a different time,” he says. “We have retrogressed. We’re in a period of amnesia. And old questions we thought we’d answered, like ‘Why do we need a black theater?,’ are being asked again. With all due respect to August Wilson, once the system found its nigger—excuse the expression—he was the one spokesman we got.”

In addition to reviving the NEC’s classic works, everyone involved in the Signature season hopes it will revitalize the current company and lay the groundwork for a future generation of black actors and writers. “The future is in the past,” playwright Lee says. “With NEC we had a home, we could fail, we could go to the edge. We need it back.”

The First Breeze of Summer is at the Signature Theatre Company through Sept 28.